“ATLAS and CMS collaborations (the two largest experiments of the Large Hadron Collider or LHC) have managed to exclude the data collected in 2011 Higgs masses in the standard model above about 127 GeV, which represents a breakthrough in this search “, explains to SINC Juan Alcaraz, principal investigator of CIEMAT in the CMS.

Cintíficos experiments ATLAS and CMS were presented today at a seminar at CERN, the status of your search for the Higgs boson predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics.Their results are based on the analysis of a data amount considerably higher than the results presented at the conference last summer, enough to make significant progress in the search for the Higgs boson, but not to make a strong statement on the existence of this elusive particle.

“In the mass range 114-127 GeV, both collaborations are slight excess, particularly on channel two-photon decay and mass in the 124-126 GeV, but the amount of data collected to date is insufficient to to determine if this really is the Higgs particle or simple statistical fluctuations somewhat higher than expected, “says Alcaraz.

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(The magnificent performance of the LHC has forced upward revision of data to achieve objectives in 2011)

After 180 days of operation and 400 trillion proton-proton collisions, the operating cycle of the LHC in 2011 came to an end at 17:15 pm on 30 October. In its second year of operation, the LHC team has exceeded its operational objectives, constantly increasing the speed at which the LHC has provided the data to the experiments.

At the beginning of the year, the goal for the LHC was to accumulate an amount of data that physicists call a reverse femtobarn during 2011. The first reverse femtobarn was reached June 17, leaving the LHC experiments in a good position ahead of the major scientific conferences and forcing Summer to revise the target upward to acquire data in 2011 to 5 femtobarns inverse . This milestone was achieved on 18 October, with a total for the year of nearly six femtobarns reverse delivered to each of the two major LHC experiments, ATLAS and CMS .

“At the end of the operating cycle with protons of the LHC this year has reached cruising speed,” said Accelerators and Technology Director of CERN , Steve Myers.

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(Future linear colliders will take over the circular.Image: UGR/LCWS11.)

The Palacio de Congresos de Granada hosts between 26 and 30 September the International Congress on Future linear colliders ( LCWS11 or Future International Workshop on Linear colliders) . It is a world congress on linear accelerators, the next generation of particle accelerators to be built after the Large Hadron Collider (LHC, for its acronym in English). In this type of facility scientists collide subatomic particles to study the building blocks of matter and answer fundamental questions of physics.

At the congress in Granada, organized by the Department of Theoretical Physics and the Cosmos, University of Granada (UGR) with support from the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) and the National Center for Particle Physics, Astroparticle and Nuclear Physics (CPAN ) involved 350 scientists from 30 countries. The opening was attended by the director of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Rolf Heuer, an organization that operates the LHC, and the rector of the University of Granada, Francisco González Lodeiro.

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The first major particle physics conference begins today in Grenoble (France). All presented results of the LHC experiments and is scheduled a news conference for Monday July 25. This conference follows a successful start of LHC operation in 2011, and the results are awaited with anticipation. “So far we have collected the amount of data planned for around 2011, which is a great achievement for the LHC,” said Rolf Heuer, general director of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research). “While it is too early for major discoveries, experiments, interesting results have already accumulated.”

The LHC experiments will be presented more accurately measures up to the date of known processes of the present model of particle physics, the Standard Model. Also provide unprecedented measures and limits on phenomena and particles like the Higgs boson.

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A group of the Institute of Photonics of the Vienna University of Technology has demonstrated the ability of graphene to convert light into electrical signal in an extremely rapid. This allows to consider applications for example in the transfer of data between computers. Expectations graphene Graphene, an allotrope of carbon where the atoms are arranged in a single layer of cells in the manner of a hive (see illustration below), drew the attention of scientists and industrialists since 2004, when its first isolation. Although relatively abundant in nature, especially since it forms the basis of graphite [1], reaching isolate a single layer with a thickness of an atom is a technological challenge. However, it is a promising material in several respects: its tensile strength is 200 times higher than steel for a lower mass, and its electrical resistivity is lower than that of silver, which is the substance with the lowest resistivity at room temperature. Its various properties are logically the subject of active research – the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded as a result of progress in research on graphene.

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(Circuit designed in the context of the Open Hardware License (OHL) and the Repository Open Hardware (OHR). Image: OHR.)

Four months after launching the first version, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Today released version 1.1 of the Open Hardware License (OHL, For short), a legal framework inspired by the free software designed to facilitate the exchange of knowledge among the community of electronic design used in particle accelerators. With this initiative, in line with the ideals of “open science”, CERN hopes to improve the quality of hardware designs through peer review and ensure that users, including businesses, freedom to study, modify and manufacture .

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When the planes pass through clouds, often “pierce” clouds of super-rich cooled, which is located in a liquid state despite being below the freezing point. This would result in an increase in rainfall in the areas affected by the busiest airports. To determine this is a study conducted by Andrew Heymsfield of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and colleagues, who sign an article of proprosito Science.

The phenomenon is facilitated by the expansion and cooling of the air behind the aircraft propeller blades and the wings of the aircraft above the clouds when the super-raffereddate have a temperature of -10 ° C or less.

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Exploiting the entanglement of individual electrons to store information in future quantum computers: this is the path opened by a research conducted by an international team of scientists at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, of the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Monaco, of Princeton University and Yale University. “What we did was light the privacy of a single electron,” Hakan said Türeci, project manager, whose results are illustrated in an article published in Nature . “It took almost a century in order to isolate, control and probing a single electron in this way, a big deal made ​​possible by quantum theory, cryogenic technologies and nanotechnologies.”

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Combining advanced laser technology in a new way, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have produced signs that are more pure and more stable than those produced with conventional electronic sources. The result could be very useful to improve the stability and resolution of radar, communication and navigation systems as well as certain types of atomic clock.

Described in the latest issue of the journal Nature Photonics , the apparatus of the NIST low noise is a new application of optical frequency combs, ultrafast laser-based tools for accurate measurements of optical frequencies.

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Quarks and gluons can be released from the state of confinement within protons and neutrons which are at a temperature of 2000 billion Kelvin, a temperature that existed in the universe just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. A support is a collaborative research by physicists of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Mumbai, India, the Polytechnic of Hefei, China, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., that illustrate an article published in Science . In his first moments the universe consisted of a dense and hot “soup” of quarks and gluons, but with its expansion the plasma is rapidly cooled, “freezing” inside protons and neutrons and other forms of matter normal, in which quarks are bound by the exchange of gluons, the carriers of the force of “color”. “The theory that describes the color force is called quantum chromodynamics, or QCD,” says Nu Xu, a spokesman for the STAR experiment Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

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